One of the ways users print consists of sending the document to the printer. To directly send a document to the printer, you need to make sure that the control, whose value needs to be printed, supports printing. To accommodate the users
of your application, you can provide a menu item or a button they would click. An example of such a button would be
. To print, the user can click this button. With this type of printing, when the user decides to print, the whole document would be printed "as is", in color if the document is colored and if the printer supports colors. If there
is more than one printer, the computer would use what is known as the default printer.

If you want users to be able to configure or customize the printing process, Microsoft Windows provides a common dialog box called
Print. Here is an example:

The Print dialog box allows a user to select a printer if more than one is available. The user can decide either to print the whole document, to print a range of pages, or to print a portion of the document that was previously selected. The user can also decide on the number of copies to print from the document, the range specified, or the selected portion. Furthermore, the user can access the particular characteristics of the selected printer and specify how the printer should perform the job. For example, if the selected printer can print in color and the document is in color but the user wants to print in black and white,
he or she can specify this using the Properties button.

Providing a Printer

To provide the users with the ability to customize printing through the Print
dialog box, you can add a
PrintDialog object
from the Dialogs section of the Toolbox to your form. The PrintDialog control is implemented through
the PrintDialog class of the System.Windows.Forms namespace. To
programmatically create a PrintDialog object, you can declare a variable of type
PrinterDialog. Here is an example:

To present the Print dialog box to the user, you can call its ShowDialog() method.

The Printing Process

The Document to Print

In order to print, the Print dialog box must be given a document to print. This
means that you must first prepare a document prior to printing. To support this,
the .NET Framework provides the PrintDocument class that is defined in the System.Drawing.Printing namespace. This class is
represented in the Toolbox by the PrintDocument button . Based on this, to
prepare a document for printing, you can either add a PrintDocument object to
your project or declare a variable of type PrintDocument. Here is an example:

After creating the document to print through a PrintDocument object, you can
associate it with a PrintDialog. To support this, the PrintDialog class
is equipped with the Document property. To specify the object that would
carry the printing, you can assign the PrintDocument object to the PrintDialog.Document
property. Here is an example:

A document to print can be made of only one or many pages. Each page has a
number of characteristics. The characteristics of a page are controlled by the PrintDocument.PageSettings
property which itself is based on the PageSettings class. The PageSettings
class is defined in the System.Drawing.Printing namespace. This class
holds the dimensions of the page, the values of the margins applied on the page,
the tray that would supply the paper (since some printers have many trays), the
printer resolution, whether the page would be printed in color or black and
white, whether the page would be printed in Portrait or Landscape orientation,
etc. If you don't want to specify these characteristics, you can set the PrintDocument.PageSettings
property to DefaultPageSettings.

If you know the name of the document to be printed, you can assign it to the PrintDocument.DocumentName
property. Here is an example:

To actually print the document, you can call the PrintDocument.Print()
method. Its syntax is:

public void Print();

Events Related to Printing

When the PrintDocument.Print()
method is called, the printing process would start by firing the BeginPrint
event but this event occurs before the first page is printed. The BeginPrint
event is of type PrintEventArgs which does not hold any particular
information, especially for the BeginPrint event. This event allows you
to take some early actions, if necessary, before the printer receives the job.

Once the printer is ready, the application would then need to know what needs to
be printed on the paper. At this time, the PrintPage event is fired. The PrintPage
event is of type PrintPageEventArgs. The PrintPageEventArgs class
allows you to fully customize the page of the document to be printed. For
example, it is equipped with a Graphics property that allows you to
"draw"
anything you want on the paper. The PrintPageEventArgs class also allows
you to get the location and dimensions of the area to be printed. This is
represented by the PageBounds property, which produces a Rectangle
object.

Once the PrintDocument object is ready, you must pass it to the Print dialog
box. To do that, assign the name of the PrintDocument variable to the PrintDialog.Document
property.

The Printer Settings

In the above example, we saw a somewhat simplistic way of making the Print
dialog box available to the user. This dialog box offers many options defined as
the Printer Settings. To support the various options of a Print dialog box, the
PrintDialog class is equipped with a property called PrinterSettings, which
itself is defined from the PrinterSettings class, which holds all possible
characteristics of a printer.

The first option presented to the user is the name of the printer to be used.
Because there can be many printers available to the user, the printers are
presented as a combo box:

The available printers may also be presented as a list view:

The Name combo box in the Printer section or the Select Printer list view allows the user to select the printer
that will handle the job. If you are writing a universal application and cannot
predict what printer(s) the user would have, you would not be concerned with this characteristic. If you are writing an application for a special company
or you are creating a particular application and
you know for sure what printer should be used to print the current document,
then you can specify the printer to use. To do this, assign the (exact) name of
the printer to the PrinterSettings.PrinterName property. On the other
hand, if for some reason you want to know what printer the user selected to
print the document, you can get the value of this PrinterName property.

Under the Name combo box, the labels provide the status of the selected printer
(whether it is ready or not),
the type of printer (such as its manufacturer), its location (such as where in
the building the printer is located; the person who installed the printer or may
have provided this printer), and an optional comment (this information is
created by the person who installed the printer or it can be changed in the
printer's properties).

After selecting the printer, the user can access the properties of that
particular printer. Different printers support different options. To configure
the printed paper based on the selected printer, the user can click either
Properties or Preferences. This opens the Document Properties or the Printing
Preferences dialog box. The content of this dialog box (highly) depends on the
printer that was selected but some characteristics are shared among printers.

On the lower-right side of the Printer section or of the Select Printer
section, there is a check box labeled Print To File. When this check box is
checked, the document is transformed into a file rather than being printed. In
this case, if the user clicks OK or Print, a dialog box would come up, asking the user to
specify the path and a name for the new file that will be created. The
appearance of that dialog box depends. Here is an example:

If you want the Print To File check box to be checked, set the PrinterSettings.PrintFoFile
Boolean property to true. Its default value is false, which lets the user decide
whether to check it or not.

After selecting the printer and deciding whether to physically print or to only
create a printed file, the user can click OK.

If the document is made of only
one page, it would be printed. If the document contains more than one page, the
user may want to print only one page, a range of pages, or all pages. The user
can also select a section in the document and print only that section. This
decision is made using the Page Range section. This section provides four radio
buttons. The first radio button labeled All is selected by default and allows
the user to print the whole document. By default, the second radio button is
disabled. If the user had selected a section of the document to print, then the
second radio button, labeled Selection would be enabled:

This allows the user to still specify whether to print the whole document or only the
section that was selected. If the document contains more than one page, the user
can navigate to a particular page and decide to print only that page using the
Current Page radio button. Again, if the document contains more than one page,
the user can specify a range of pages to print.
All these options are usually left up to the user. On the other hand, if you
want to specify the range of pages to print, you can use the PrinterSettings.FromPage
and the ToPage properties. If you want to specify the limits of ranges allowed
to the user, use the MinimumPage and the MaximumPage properties.

On the right side of the Page Range section, a spin button allows the user to
specify the number of copies to make when printing. If you want to specify this
number by default, assign the desired value to the Copies property. If the user
(or you) set this number to a value higher than 1, then the printed papers
can be collated or not. This is specified using the Collate check box. If you
want to programmatically collate the pages or not, change the Boolean value of
the Collate property.